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>Henry: I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.
Debbie: Death?
Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.
-          Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Toni Morrison’s “early stuff” occupies a stratum in world literature that is difficult for any writer to live up to. This week, The Guardian’s panel of 172 literary luminaries declared Morrison’s Beloved the second greatest novel in the artform’s history, placing her work above that of every fictionist who ever lived apart from George Eliot. Hardly surprising, then, that Morrison received fewer adulatory notices at 84 years of age than she did at her zenith. Still, I can’t help feeling almost personally affronted by the myopic ingratitude of some of the elite critics tasked with assessing God Help the Child, the eleventh and final novel (she was working on a twelfth when she died) by this generation’s literary doyenne. Kara Walker of The New York Times compared it to reality TV and dismissed it as a “curt fable” aimed at provoking “outrage.” The Independent complained Morrison’s characters were “prototypes for an idea rather than real people.” In The Washington Post, Ron Charles was by turns tone-deaf (“the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma, throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling”) and snarky (“If thoughts like that strike you as both fresh and somehow eternal, you’re in luck: There are a lot of them here”), at one point helpfully pointing out that “You not the woman I want” was “a jarring bit of Ebonics” in the mouth of a character with academic bona fides, as though America’s most celebrated poet of everyday Black speech had accidentally misplaced a helping verb. Charles managed one salient insight in dispensing his breathtakingly disrespectful review: “Because her latest work offers curious reflections of where she began in The Bluest Eye, it’s tempting to read God Help the Child as a capstone of her jeweled career.” In context, this observation was merely another opportunity to insult a national treasure, but he was right about the shared genetic tissue tying Morrison’s 1970 debut, about a Black child who longs to look whiter, to her 2015 swansong, about a dark-skinned woman who outlives the consensus that Black is ugly.

The relationship between the two novels has frequently been noted, but a 2015 Essence interview with Morrison confirms my suspicion that it runs deeper than a shared interest in colorism within the Black community. “[Racism today] is certainly not like The Bluest Eye,” Morrison said. “God Help the Child is set in 2007 or 2008, so it’s quite different. I felt I could hang on to that; I could write about those changes.” Functionally speaking, God Help the Child is an unofficial sequel to The Bluest Eye. It consciously revisits the racial trauma Morrison symbolized in the paternal sexual abuse of young Pecola Breedlove in 1940s Ohio and examines the continued legacy of that trauma in the adult lives of twenty-first-century Black New Yorkers. God Help the Child may not always exhibit the formal inventiveness, heightened lyrical expressiveness, and raw power of the slim volume that catapulted Morrison from a publishing career to the pinnacle of world literature. But to understate the latter novel’s commentary on its seminal predecessor is to miss the source of its own substantial emotional clout.

PHYSICAL BEAUTY

The masterstroke of The Bluest Eye was the identification of societal conceptions of beauty as a subtle enforcement mechanism employed by racist white America. Yes, more conventional applications of racial violence are invoked in that book: white men forcing Pecola’s parents to perform for their own sexual gratification, a white gynecologist comparing Black mothers to horses, a candy store clerk shrinking from Pecola’s inadvertent touch during a financial transaction. But the greatest violence in Morrison’s debut is perpetrated by the impossible standard of white beauty. Pecola’s mother trying to emulate Jean Harlow’s movie star hair. A “mulatto girl” in a Claudette Colbert movie hating her mother for her blackness. The insidious consensus that “a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” This depiction of the weaponization of physical beauty by white America had personal magnitude for Morrison. The book is set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio, the precise time and place the author occupied as a ten year old.

God Help the Child demonstrates the legacy of that trauma in 2007 New York City. The characters are adults now. They are successful in ways that Pecola could only dream of: protagonist Bride is a cosmetics executive and her lover Booker (a name with as much explicit significance as “Breedlove”) is an intellectual with a graduate education. Yet God Help the Child is not an unmitigated Huxtable-esque success story. Every character in it struggles to overcome some form of childhood abuse. The unflinching focus on the permanent wounds of child abuse is reflected in Morrison’s preferred title, rejected by Alfred Knopf: The Wrath of Children.

In this context of trauma-haunted racial progress, Morrison asserts that the contemporary fetishization of Black beauty can be almost as unhealthy as the denial of it. The opening chapters retread the Pecola issues: its rotating first-person narration begins with Bride’s mother, Sweetness, confessing that she resisted physical contact with her infant daughter out of revulsion for her skin color. But when Bride comes of age, the world showers her with praise for her physical appearance. An especially effective moment in the novel is the way a white boyfriend attempts to act out Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, a 1967 film about a white daughter who teaches her parents to tolerate her boyfriend Sidney Poitier, for reasons that have nothing to do with racial justice:

>I remember one date in particular, a medical student who persuaded me to join him on a visit to his parents’ house up north. As soon as he introduced me it was clear I was there to terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept repeating. “Look at her, Mother? Dad?” His eyes were gleaming with malice. But they outclassed him with their warmth—however faked—and charm. His disappointment was obvious, his anger thinly repressed. His parents even drove me to the train stop, probably so I wouldn’t have to put up with his failed racist joke on them. I was relieved, even knowing what the mother did with my used teacup.

The boyfriend wants to weaponize societal antiracist frown power just to make his parents feel uncomfortable. Morrison doesn’t trust that sort of performative adulation of Blackness any more than she trusts Bride’s dependence on it: “That’s all she’s invested in,” Morrison explained to Essence. “She’s not complete. Either one of those things is destructive: Using it as a boost or being destroyed by it.” Of course, beauty has been the tool of the oppressor against women in general, and not just Black Americans, for centuries. Morrison is writing about the keen blade’s underside hidden in every introduction of “my accomplished son and beautiful daughters” or “the lovely Miss So-and-So.”

ROMANTIC LOVE

In both The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child, Morrison couples the idolatrous worship of physical beauty with that of romantic love. In one scene, little Pecola reflects on the men who are always loving and leaving women in popular music. “How do you do that?” she asks. “I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” Her mother, Pauline, the one exposing Pecola to old love songs, has long associated beauty and love in an unhealthy way: “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”

For its part, God Help the Child portrays the way that an obsessive romantic love based on attraction crumbles into tragedy when the beloved leaves. Bride is so devastated by Booker’s sudden exit that her body literally begins to change: “Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.” She becomes the battered victim who accused an innocent woman of child abuse in order to win her colorist mother’s love. Put another way, the proud, grown-up Bride regresses back into Pecola’s degraded form. In his review, Ron Charles saw the narrative risk Morrison was taking with this sole departure into Magical Realism and pounced, brutishly:

>In the semi-magical worlds Morrison has created before, such surreal touches seem both evocative and weirdly natural, but in the flat language of this novel, they're clunky symbols, needlessly explained.

In my view, though, that’s a lazy reading. It’s easy to dismiss such a sore-thumb stylistic move, but Morrison’s boldness pays off precisely because it is isolated. It gives her otherwise grounded prose permission to sing.

SELF-LOVE

Morrison’s antidote to these societal afflictions lies in expanded notions of beauty and love. In her introduction to a 2007 edition of The Bluest Eye, Morrison recalled an elementary school classmate who longed for blue eyes, the inspiration for that novel.

>Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it… In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

This radical notion of beauty as action as opposed to inherited appearance is played out in Bride’s heroic response to her own pain. Instead of crumbling like Pecola, she takes arms against her sea of troubles, embarking on a quest to find Booker and force him to account for his decision to abandon her. The nuance in this goal is crucial. Bride insists on a respectful separation, not reconciliation at any cost. Revisiting The Bluest Eye in a contemporary context gives Morrison permission to begin writing a healing process that eluded those characters in the first novel. Pecola never moves from self-contempt to self-acceptance. She bears her father’s stillborn child and never recovers. But the news in God Help the Child that Bride and Booker will bear a child of their own signals that that self-love is finally branching into shared love. Bride has learned the lesson Sethe struggles to learn in Beloved: “you your own best thing.”

BEAUTY IS SOMETHING ONE CAN DO

Throughout her glorious canon, Morrison never settled for merely depicting beauty as action. She modeled it in the act of crafting radiant prose of searing insight through shifting vernacular registers. The consistently generous moral wisdom of Morrison’s writing recalls that of her partner at the top of the Guardian’s list: Mary Ann Evans, who defied a world that thought her ugly by becoming George Eliot. In a sense, the Guardian’s selection of Middlemarch and Beloved as English-language literary exemplars is a logical pairing. Eliot’s novel championed a woman of conventional beauty but exceptional moral clarity. Morrison’s championed a woman seen as ugly who fought ferociously for love. Bride earns a place in that tradition.

Morrison never names the year God Help the Child takes place, but she told Essence that it is 2007-2008. In other words, the year that Barack Obama’s message of change temporarily filled the Black community with hope for healing and self-acceptance on a national scale. Today, progress from Pecola’s 1941 to Bride’s 2008 is under assault on the pretense that national racial healing has already been accomplished. The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child provide reminders that abuse leaves wounds that can only be healed by beauty in action.

I sometimes regret not having read Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. Director Joe Wright’s 2007 film adaptation, which I have seen, deftly explores the fine line between commonplace childhood self-absorption and casually cruel deceit with lasting consequences. It leaves an impression of masterful, must-read source material that may lose its power on the page once you’ve taken the journey on screen. That sense of missed opportunity even motivated me to check out McEwan’s Kafkaesque novella The Cockroach a couple years back, but that was, um, not a comparable experience. When I heard that his 2025 novel What We Can Know was his best reviewed since Atonement, it made sense to grab the newcomer in hardcover before Matin Freeman and Sally Hawkins are cast as its dual narrators in some future film version. The decision paid dividends. McEwan’s tragicomic novel is a finely calibrated indictment of the present from the perspective of a compromised future.

A FUTURE WITH MORE REGRETS THAN FLYING CARS

The book is split between 2025 and 2125 (and the surrounding years), giving McEwan an opportunity to construct his own dystopian reflection of our era in the hall of mirrors of contemporary science fiction. I haven’t read enough sci-fi to rank his dystopia against all the others, but McEwan’s vision of the coming century felt like a reasonably fresh take to me. Instead of describing flying cars and hostile robot overlords, he constructs an Earth that is just beginning to work its way back to the technological accomplishments of our era. Biodiversity, too, is starting to recover from the mass extinctions of our Holocene epoch, although the organic food supply seems beyond renewal. Future generations are loathe to forgive ours for ignoring the climate crisis, empowering reckless artificial intelligence, and mounting nuclear conflicts that apparently have their roots in Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. They are not impressed that our cultural and artistic output dwarfs theirs, and their attitude toward studying our history can be summarized by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s memorable assessment of the 1995 film Carrington: “Who cares about these awful people?”

THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE

I feel better qualified to comment on McEwan’s exploration of the futility of biography than to compare dystopias. Like many of my most cherished literary works, McEwan’s novel portrays biographers struggling to learn critical truths about their subjects. My favorite playwright, the late Tom Stoppard, was fascinated by the theme of “what we can know,” and he famously distrusted biography. In his 1995 play Indian Ink, a footnote-happy poetry editor effuses about the opportunities that artists afford biographers: “This is why God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published.” The elderly sister of a famous poet rejoins, “biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” Stoppard’s finest play, Arcadia, pits a Byron biographer with a galling confidence in his own “gut instinct” about 300-year-old mysteries against a colleague who relishes her own uncertainty (“If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final”). Stoppard admitted he had “pinched” Arcadia’s structure from A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, one of the best books I read last year. The latter work is about a contemporary scholar who finds an uncatalogued love letter from one major Victorian poet to another in a library book, raising questions about who ultimately owns the secrets of the past. Another Byatt novel, The Biographer’s Tale, depicts a disillusioned graduate student yearning to trade the abstractions of postmodern philosophy for the tangible facts in which a biographer traffics. In this respect, What We Can Know is treading well-worn territory, even hallowed ground.

WHAT WILL OUR DESCENDENTS THINK OF US?

McEwan’s main contribution is to ask not what is knowable about yesterday, as did Stoppard and Byatt, but what will be knowable about today when tomorrow arrives. In this novel, the denizens of the present largely hold the power to choose what is remembered of their time, but their choices usually end up obscuring the very things they most wish to preserve. In this way, McEwan recalls Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “each man kills the thing he loves.” In the novel, Francis Bundy, the most renowned poet of 2025, dreams that his poem “Corona for Vivien” (a corona is a union of seven sonnets) will leave an indelible mark on the future: “Would it, could it be understood? He thought it might need footnotes, sensible, helpful ones, unlike Eliot’s at the end of The Waste Land. He believed that this work equaled or surpassed Eliot’s poem.” Yet when the future arrives, Bundy’s poem is remembered not for its literary achievements but because it seems irretrievably lost to history. Although it remains concealed from the public, rumors circulate about its contents. Based on rumor alone, the poem is celebrated as a paean to a clean environment. In reality, however, Bundy was an intransigent climate denier, the poster boy for our generation’s callousness toward our descendants. Some in the future imagine the corona was an ode to the lost art of interpersonal intimacy. Ironically, Bundy’s wife Vivien may have prevented its publication due to her own marital dissatisfaction.

PROBING OUR DISSOLUTION WITH WIT

The author presents all this moral reckoning with a light comic touch. McEwan’s breezy and confident wit provides a gently barbed send-up of academia that has more in common with the works of Michael Frayn than the dazzling wordplay of Stoppard. Imagine the characters and tone of Frayn’s novel The Trick of It, a comic romp in which a pedantic adjunct marries the novelist he teaches to undergrads, merged with the epistemological themes of his play Copenhagen, in which Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle illuminates the impossibility of reconstructing the past. In one scene, McEwan narrates a poetry reading from Bundy’s perspective, and his oration leaves the audience in stunned silence. A woman wipes away tears. Then, one by one, we enter the listeners’ minds and discover that none of them were paying attention. The woman’s tears were inspired by something else entirely. In another scene, the students of the future stage a walkout of a lecture on Bundy out of righteous disgust with our generation. The superficial suavity of Vivien’s lover Harry Kitchener, whom she deliberately wounds by dating a superior writer, is itself worth the price of admission.

AN ELEGY FOR THE PRESENT

Despite its amusing veneer, What We Can Know is at its core a lament for a society incapable of sustaining itself. McEwan masterfully captures the simultaneous talent, depravity, generosity, and brutality of humanity. When he writes about a 20th century mother dropping acid while her child suffocates in its crib, he is conjuring the greed and convenience that motivate our neglect of the future. When he poignantly portrays an Alzheimer’s victim’s gradual mental disintegration, he gestures toward the loss of communal memory that humanity seems destined to endure. The central question of the book may be whether our heirs will care any more for us than we do for them. Who cares about these awful people, indeed.